Jiro Okura

A survey of late Japanese minimalist sculptor Jiro Okura (1942-2014) reconnects an underseen international figure with the Appalachian site that shaped a pivotal body of work.

In the summer of 1990, Okura traveled from Kyoto to Southwest Virginia, where eight black walnut trees from the Jefferson National Forest had been selected for him — blessed in a Shinto ceremony before they were cut, their living spirit honored before becoming art. From that wood, Okura and a community of students, artists, and neighbors built Mountain Lake Screen Tachi, 16 towering folding screens, painted and gilded, that when set across an Appalachian hillside stretched more than 100 feet. Together, they formed a movable wall between cultures, between nature and form, between presence and disappearance.

This exhibition brings together eight of those screens alongside works on paper, sculpture, and installation that extend the same meditative practice across materials and scale. Large sumi ink drawings register branches, leaves, and other fragments of the world through thousands of repeated brushstrokes, leaving their forms behind as absences.

In Souls on Garbage (1998), that same discipline of repeated line is carried into three dimensions, unifying discarded objects across a painted ground and transforming the residue of consumer life into something closer to sacred assemblage. A small group of carved camphor wood sculptures from the early 1980s returns us to the point where this practice begins: in the repeated cut of the blade, in the cut surface as bodily chanting, and in wood approached not as inert material, but as a living presence.

Born in Tokyo and long active in Kyoto, Okura developed a practice shaped by Shinto reverence for the living spirit within natural materials and by a Buddhist understanding of impermanence. He moved fluidly between drawing, sculpture, and installation, guided less by composition than by attention: the repeated cut of a blade, the sweep of a brush, a simple action performed again and again as a form of bodily chanting until the mind empties and something deeper begins to surface. His work doesn’t so much represent nature as enter into relation with it, allowing wood, paper, light, gravity, and time to remain active participants in the making of form.

Okura was a guest artist at the Mountain Lake Workshop, a series of collaborative, community-based art projects rooted in the customs and resources of the Appalachian region. Founded by Ray Kass, professor emeritus of art in Virginia Tech’s School of Visual Arts in the College of Architecture, Arts, and Design, the program has produced collaborative works between guest artists and members of the local community surrounding Mountain Lake in Giles County.

At Mountain Lake, Okura found not only a landscape whose scale and stillness resonated with ideas already central to his practice, but a collaborative way of working that expanded it. Through the shared experiments of the Mountain Lake Workshops, he opened his work more fully to chance: to the unpredictable encounter between object and mark, material and gesture, individual action and collective process. The works gathered here arose from that exchange between artist, place, and community, yet they remain unmistakably his: quiet, rigorous, and open. What they ask of the viewer is not interpretation so much as presence — the same sustained attention Okura brought to every cut, every mark, every gesture. Like breath moving between body and air, these works hover between visibility and disappearance, holding for a moment the meeting of matter and spirit.

Biography

Jiro Okura’s (b. Tokyo, 1942-2014) participation in the Mountain Lake Workshop (1990-1998) is considered among the most poetic and conceptually nuanced contributions in the program’s history. Okura’s incorporation of natural forces like gravity, wind, light, and discarded materials reveal his dedication to imperfection, rawness, and deep reverence for nature and fellow man.

Image

Mountain Lake Screen Tachi, 1990; cashew oil paint and gold leaf on black walnut; 16 four-panel screens; 102 inches high, width variable